Director Talks Dennis Hopper In ’71 Docu: ‘I’m Not Saying He Never Made It With Somebody In a Bathtub...’

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Dennis Hopper in ‘The American Dreamer’ (Photo: Polaris Communications)

Dennis Hopper may have been the most important person in Hollywood at the dawn of the 1970s. A bit player in the industry for much of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the Kansas-born actor provided an explosive finish to a tumultuous decade in 1969 with his independently financed, wildly successful directorial debut, Easy Rider. As chronicled in Peter Biskind’s invaluable Hollywood history, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the movie’s rise from out of the counterculture rattled the already-shaky studio system to its core, paving the way for the auteur-driven renaissance that defined pre-Star Wars ‘70s cinema.

But Hopper never really entered that promised land he helped find. In the wake of the almost absurdly low-budget Easy Rider, Universal Studios handed him $1 million for his follow-up, The Last Movie, a trippy movie-within-a-movie Western that he shot almost entirely on location in Peru. Following a notoriously raucous production, Hopper retreated to his home in Taos, New Mexico, for a lengthy edit riddled with missed deadlines, and a final cut that failed to please the studio, critics, or audiences. The Last Movie’s commercial failure essentially grounded Hopper’s filmmaking career (he wouldn’t direct again until 1980′s Out of the Blue), and it took years for him to regain his stature as an actor as well, eventually finding a fruitful revival as Hollywood’s go-to oddball bad guy in films like Blue Velvet, Speed, and Waterworld.

Watch a trailer for ‘The Last Movie,’ the film that effectively ended Hopper’s directorial career.


While Hopper was editing The Last Movie, Lawrence Schiller was there to film what became his 1971 sort-of documentary, The American Dreamer–which this week became available for purchase for the first time ever via iTunes. "What’s interesting,” Schiller tells Yahoo Movies, “is that the film is not a pure documentary. Dennis Hopper is playing the character of Dennis Hopper in a documentary, and whether that’s a challenge for him as an actor, whether it’s hubris, or whether it’s a unique way of seeing into his mind as he straddles both positions is for an audience to determine. That’s why Dennis receives a writing credit for the film.”

Schiller started out as a photojournalist snapping pictures of big stars for magazines like Life and Playboy, until he decided to step behind a different kind of camera. “The American Dreamer is also a film about myself, because I’m making the transition from photojournalist to filmmaker,” Schiller explains. “I’m learning at the same time that Dennis is seeking to become an established director. Of course, he falls off Mount Olympus and never regains his stature as a director during his lifetime.” (Hopper died in 2010.)

Schiller, on the other hand, went on to direct a number of films for both the big screen and TV, including the Oscar-winning documentary, The Man Who Skied Down Everest, and The Executioner’s Song, starring Tommy Lee Jones as real-life convicted killer, Gary Gilmore. (The film is based on Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel that was part of a 35-year collaboration between Mailer and Schiller.) He’s also kept a hand in journalism, becoming an important source of breaking news during the 1994 O.J. Simpson case, which formed the basis for his own book, American Tragedy.

Like The Last Movie, The American Dreamer has recently emerged from decades in obscurity. As Hopper’s movie has found renewed interest at special screenings, The American Dreamer has been touring the world at museums and film societies, leading to its digital debut, which follows a Blu-ray/DVD release last fall. (Visit the official website for more details, and read more about Schiller’s prolific career at his own site.) In the wide-ranging conversation below, the 79-year-old author/photographer/filmmaker fills us in on two scenes that didn’t make it into The American Dreamer, the time that Dennis Hopper met Charlie Manson, what it was like to photograph Marilyn Monroe, and more.

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Hopper blows of steam in between marathon editing sessions for ‘The Last Movie’ (Photo: Polaris Communications)

The American Dreamer has been out of circulation for decades. How were you able to bring it back to the public eye?
L.M. Kit Carson, who co-directed the film, was a very close friend, and he and I decided a number of years ago to donate the film to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which has a very big documentary archive. They raised the money to preserve and restore the film, and for their 75th anniversary last year, I came up with the idea of re-releasing it and all profits would go to the further restoration of other documentaries in its archives. So that’s really the basis for how the film re-emerged. It provides a window into a period of time when there weren’t many documentaries being made about people involved in the creative process.

During its initial run, was the film commonly shown in conjunction with The Last Movie?
No, I owned the film. I’ve always owned it. It ran at college campuses in the early ‘70s all across the country. The Last Movie was not finished when it first came out, and when it was released, it didn’t find an audience. When Dennis bought the movie back from Universal and decided to have it shown at film festivals, he always insisted that The American Dreamer be shown simultaneously, either before or after depending on the festival. [His estate] owns The Last Movie now. I haven’t heard of any plans to re-release it.

Do you have a preference for the order in which the films should be viewed?
No, I think they’re completely independent. I don’t think our film is about him making the movie—it’s about an actor in transition to becoming a director. In many of the scenes, we would say to Dennis, “What do we want to achieve in this scene?” Everything in between was extemporaneous, but the film itself is not extemporaneous. Dennis wanted no approval over the film; he didn’t even see it until after it started to play. He was very respectful of us.

How did he draw a line between his actual self and the character he’s playing?
There were parts of the film where he’s very, very serious. But there were other parts [where he was acting]. He knew I’d been involved with Charles Manson [Schiller interviewed “Manson Family” member Susan Atkins, and published his account in newspapers and the book, The Killing of Sharon Tate], so before making The American Dreamer, he asked to meet him in prison. I set up the meeting through an attorney, but wasn’t present. He wanted to prepare like a Method actor for one aspect of the film, which were his fantasies involving women.

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Hopper lived out his fantasies in ‘The American Dreamer’ but declined to bare all for the camera (Photo: Polaris Communications)

So the sexual encounters we see are more of a reflection of his fantasy life?
I think so. I’m not saying he never made it with somebody in a bathtub or was never in a threesome or a foursome. But here he goes to an extreme [in the film] to make a point. I chastised him after we did those scenes—as you can tell, we often included the friction between myself and Dennis in the film—because the girls were completely relaxed and had no qualms about frontal nudity, whereas Dennis refused to reveal himself in that manner. There was a certain amount of hypocrisy with him playing that scene to the camera.

Over how long a period of time did you shoot the movie?
We went to his home in Taos for three weeks, and went out for another two after we looked at the footage. When we had our rough cut done, we realized that we didn’t have an opening sequence. So we came up with the idea of just knocking on his door and entering his life.

What sequences were left on the cutting room floor?
There’s a sequence of Annie Leibovitz photographing him that didn’t make the cut. And there’s another sequence where his brother goes to the airport to find the girls for the Charlie Manson-inspired scene. His brother drove down to the airport, and when he saw girls coming off planes that weren’t being greeted by somebody and looked hippie and spaced out, he’d go up to them and say, “How’d you like to be in a film with Dennis Hopper?” Of course, nobody said no! That scene didn’t make the cut.

Watch the trailer for ‘The American Dreamer,’ which puts Hopper’s exciting hubris on full display.

Before transitioning to filmmaking, you photographed some of the biggest movie stars of the ‘60s. What’s the biggest difference you see between that generation of actors and this one?
I think the stars of that era were more natural, whereas now there are too many handlers and stylists that travel like an entourage with them. Back then, you could spend several days [photographing] Jack Lemmon or Walter Matthau or Bette Davis and you’d never even see any of their advisors or team. I remember several times where I’d be working very late with Jack Lemmon and he’d tell me to just sleep on his couch. That doesn’t exist anymore. Even though actors had very big egos at the time and understood their power, they were more willing to submerge their egos than the talent of today.

Someone like Marilyn Monroe, however, always seemed very in control of her public image. Were you required to help reinforce that?
I never reinforced it because I never really shot her in the studio, where she did reinforce her image all the time. I shot her journalistically in 1960 and 1962. I was young myself, in my early 20s, and even though she was a superstar by today’s standards, to me it was just another assignment. When I went to photograph her the first time, I didn’t even tell my wife! I wound up working late, and she sent my wife a note saying, “Sorry to keep Larry so late tonight.” How she found out where I lived, I don’t know!

You also had an extensive collaboration with Norman Mailer. How did that relationship come about?
When I was leaving photojournalism I started putting together books of photographs with text. On the 10th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, I had an idea to do a book with 24 of the world’s foremost photographers who had photographed her. I felt that there were only two writers in the world who could give me great text: One was Gloria Steinem and the other was Norman Mailer. So I was able to hire Mailer to write the text for that book, and that started our collaboration. We went on to do five more books together, including The Faith of Graffiti and The Executioner’s Song. When he died, I started the Norman Mailer Center, which gives out scholarships and so forth.

Did you notice any similarities between Mailer and Hopper?
We all had the same egos, including myself. I’m a little more commercially minded, so I was able to put mine aside. I didn’t need my name to be that big on the cover of the books.

Your involvement in the O.J. Simpson trial is timely thanks to the new FX series, The People vs. O.J. Simpson.
I think that series is very good from an irreverent point of view. It’s directed like a soap opera, which is how a contemporary audience can relate to it. I directed a TV movie for CBS in 2000 based on my own book, American Tragedy, and I went a more serious route because I was closer to the time when it took place. Now that we have 20 years distance, you can satirize it very well. The new series is good entertainment and conveys a time and place. The Simpson case is really the first reality TV show that modern pop culture had.

The American Dreamer feels like it presages reality television as well; the idea of using the camera for self-portraiture.
I don’t want to say the film was ahead of its time, but we were pushing the envelope. Young viewers are surprised by some of it, but it’s played well for a lot of audiences. It gets really great responses every time.

Dennis Hopper in “The American Dreamer’: Get a glimpse here (brief nudity):